Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:24PM
from the right-to-tinker dept.

Ponca City, We love you writes "The EFF has warned Texas Instruments not to pursue legal threats against calculator hobbyists who perform modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators. TI's calculators perform a 'signature check' that allows only approved operating systems to be loaded, but researchers have reverse-engineered signing keys, allowing tinkerers to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators' hardware. In response, TI has unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys. 'This is not about copyright infringement. This is about running your own software on your own device — a calculator you legally bought,' says EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. 'Yet TI still issued empty legal threats in an attempt to shut down discussion of this legitimate tinkering. Hobbyists are taking their own tools and making them better, in the best tradition of American innovation.'"

"Hobbyists are taking their own tools and making them better, in the best tradition of American innovation"? I think you misspelled "Pirates and cyber-terrorists are stealing money from TI's hardworking engineers at virtual gunpoint."

If I buy a TI or anything else, how is that STEALING from the people that made it. they asked for a fair price, I paid. what difference does it make to them what I use it for once they have their money.

does that mean I can't install linux on my computer without being called a cyberterrorist?

Ummm... My opinion is that the hobbyists are just trying to fix some bugs in calculators that the *IAA has been running into. Like for example, when they calculate damages. I think the results look similar to this: 3055 songs pirated * 0.99 per song = $309,234,408,345,345,384.94 in damages...

I know you're kidding, but the sad thing is that this is probably just company lawyers trying to justify their jobs. Most TI engineers are likely to not care or love the hacks for the geek factor. TI ought to capitalize on this, not suppress it.

I think this has to do with TI maintaining their monopoly on the educational market. TI calculators are just about the only ones high-school math teachers support. Those teachers need to know that the calculators in their classrooms don't have extra programs that would help a kid cheat on a test. That's easy enough to check with the default TI OS. If the OS has been replaced, all bets are off.

While the guys making hacks obviously know a bit about the technology as they managed to get something working.

That in no way makes them qualified software engineers or developers.

I regularly turn out a 'hack' in a weekend, then spend a month getting it production ready, testing it, trying everything I can think of to break it, then throwing every automated test (based on stuff our customers have done) at it, then double checking documentation, and plenty of other stuff th

There is no issue with the legality of what the hackers did. Article 17, section 1201(f) explicitly exempts this situation (from http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html#1201 [copyright.gov]):"a person... may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program... that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs"

A long time ago I was doing consulting work and had the misfortune of being selected for jury duty. As I would not be fully-compensated for my time (I was my own employer), I wanted to get out of that case as fast as possible. I figured I wouldn't even get selected, so I'd just lose that one day.

In Jury selection in my county, everyone is called into a holding area (cafeteria) and then groups of 30 or so are selected to sit in the courtroom for the jury selection. I was selected for a group, and then selected to sit in the jury box as one of the initial 12. I was going to be on the case.

Initial arguments was the case was about a guy fighting Carrying concealed without a permit charges. The 12 of us in the box were asked individually "is there anything that would prevent us from ruling on this case in accordance to the laws?"

I didn't have the time to sit on the case, so I replied "I'm a Constitutionalist and I know what Jury Nullification means."

Oh, I was released alright; SO WAS EVERY PROSPECTIVE JUROR IN THE ROOM!!!!

30 of us got out of jury duty because I said the magic words. The State is that afraid of people knowing they have power over them.

You are allowed to totally reload any software onto that hardware that you legally own/create/patch to make work.You are not allowed to use that altered or custom software to gain free access to their programming database for schedule information since that's part of the subscription you signed up for to use the box as it was. That's not to say that you couldn't make some software that gets the onformation from another source and uses the hardware to do the DVR functions using alternate drivers and all.

You purchased the box and subscribe to the service. If you don't want the service you can cancel. Unless you got a deal for signing up for a number of years you're done with them and keep the hardware. You can now do with it as you please. Smash it with a hammer, sell it on ebay, or load a flavor of linux and have a dedicated dvr box with full control of the hardware you own. Minus the warranty of course. But really? What are electronics warranties worth these days anyway? Hack it!

They're not. But facts wouldn't get in the way of some good old fashioned hyperbole, particularly if it involves whatever vendor you're choosing to hate.

Wrong, the crap that Apple pulls is way worse than TI can dream of.

Calculators are not advertised or thought of by most people as mobile computers. TI doesn't advertize "There's an App for that". It's sad that Apple forces developers to jump through hoops just to get an App proved and bans any political or other useful Apps under the name of duplicate functionality. Apple also has a forced developer tax of 30% and hence prohibits downloads from the developer's website. The alternative is to jailbreak, but i

And anyway you can easily compile a C program to run on anyone's TI-89 without paying TI for signing. All this drama is only about custom operating systems - OS images must be signed - but unlike the iphone they're already programmable.

Apple is advertising the strength of their App store, showing off the apps available, and then contrasting that to the usefulness of a netbook.

I think Apple's wrong here, a netbook is way more useful, but, they're certainly doing nothing that's immoral or worse than what TI's doing.

TI's out to protect itself and the institutions that depend on the OS being in a protected state. hence they're putting pressure on the TI calc community. What makes it worse is that if they litigate, they'll win. Most users a

How much money have you contributed to the EFF? It's amazing how many people make demands like yours without giving the slightest thought to the expenses involved. In addition, any movement in the right direction is progress. Maybe TI will decide to sue some hobbyists, with the EFF ready to fight for a legal precedent that might finally put a stop to this nonsense.

Also it is a lot harder make claims about DRM and piracy and such when you are dealing with a calculator. So this legal fight would be easier to win than eg vs Nintendo who can say "if we don't do it we will lose X amount of money." TI can't exactly claim that they are losing money from this because they don't sell any kind of software add ons for their calculator (afaik.)

My guess is that they feel like they have a better chance of winning if TI calls their bluff about calculators than if Nintendo did about Wiis, since the "it's only for teh P1Rasee!" argument is pretty much inapplicable.

What about all the similar crap that goes on with other devices? iPhone, XBOX, Wii, NDS, plus loads others?! EFF, why aren't you defending user's rights there?

Hacking or modding any of the consoles you listed will allow you to run copied games. You can see why the companies making the console (and apart from Wii selling the consoles at a loss) doesn't like the modding. However, you can't really claim that you are selling a TI calculator at a loss hoping to make the additional money from software sales, nor

What about all the similar crap that goes on with other devices? iPhone, XBOX, Wii, NDS, plus loads others?! EFF, why aren't you defending user's rights there?

They issued a press release about the calculators.They have done way more than that for the iphone and ipod - http://www.eff.org/press/mentions/2009/7/23 [eff.org] They supported the "Hacking the Xbox" book by using it as a prize for people who donated to the EFF.

Really, because it doesn't seem so. Nintendo has rolled out many updates that didn't even bother removing homebrew. The latest update did, but it was soooo easy to work around that it looked like they wanted it to be worked around.

How many people have to buy the overpriced calculators because they are required for an exam.... by required I mean "approved" for use on an exam. Think about it, a calculator costing $100 dollars? What year is it again? If you could program them yourselves suddenly all those "approved" calculators aren't so trustworthy not to solve the exam for students.... although honestly if a calculator can solve the exam then probably the exam isn't testing much...

If you could program them yourselves suddenly all those "approved" calculators aren't so trustworthy not to solve the exam for students.... although honestly if a calculator can solve the exam then probably the exam isn't testing much...

I never really understood why my high school and college math instructors insisted on writing exams that required me to work to a result such that a calculator was required. A well-written exam that tests knowledge of evaluating the arithmetic or calculus properties of a given function would obviate the whole issue of the trustworthiness of a calculator. It would also save students from what I always found to be frustrating, stressful, and easy-to-make data-entry errors.

When I took statistics exams 10 years ago we had a choice of using the exam board's printed tables or our calculators for values of the normal, Student t and chi-squared distributions. It's tricky. In "real life" you're going to use the calculator: it's easier than the table and gives more significant figures. On the other hand, if you used the full accuracy of the value provided by the calculator and then rounded to the specified number of significant figures at the end then sometimes you would differ by 1

When will companies realize that kicking and screaming about an issue they can't legitimatize will kick them in the testicles? Will T.I. really lose oodles of greenbacks because Joe geek likes to mod his calculator to play Mario or run Linux or watch porn (last item questionable). I highly doubt people hacking their calculators will cut into revenue, if anything it will increase it by bolstering interest in the extended possibilities of their products. Technophiles do not like to buy equipment they are legally castrated for modding or learning about the inner-workings.

When profit is valued more than satisfaction of customers...oh wait..*status quo* *status quo*.

The answer to the original question lies our government and legal system's ability to cease giving them the fucking pacifier every time they cry wolf.

The problem here is that once you can replace the OS, it becomes impossible for teachers or exam supervisors to verify that the calculator really HAS been reset or that it really HAS had the special exam feature loaded on it (dont know what its called but it can lock out calculator features).

Because of this, those who set the exams are going to start dropping the hackable TI calculators from the "approved calculators" list.

Thank you EFF for confronting the corporate greed machine where it concerns this electronic frontier. Now we need to find lawyers to confront them on every other issue where citizens and consumers are ripped off and enslaved by corporate monoliths and their shareholders. People come first. Not Corporate interests. Wake up America. We need better elected officials, apparently.

The DMCA is totally ridiculous, but it's the only thing TI can grasp onto in this situation. TI graphing calculators are the de facto standard for many high school and university level math classes. It's easy to verify that one has had the memory erased when it's in an untampered state. Of course there are somewhat sneaky ways to make it look like it's been erased without close inspection, but performing the reset in front of someone made it almost a certainty. If the hack causes schools to move away from such an "untrustworthy" device, TI stands to lose many sales of those overpriced gadgets.

The numbers they are distributing are the prime factors of the RSA key used by the calculators. The factors were determined by a general number field sieve [wikipedia.org] calculation; this was effective because the keys are only 512 bits long.

The public key itself - the modulus - might be subject to copyright. However, the prime factors were never copied from TI - they were mathematically determined from the modulus. Attacking them because they distribute numbers mathematically derived from a copyrighted number is new legal territory.

If numbers derived from a calculation on a copyrightable number are themselves "derivative works" in the copyright sense, it would cause far-reaching problems well beyond calculators. For one thing, it would be illegal to distribute SHA-1 hashes of copyrighted material without permission.

"If numbers derived from a calculation on a copyrightable number are themselves "derivative works" in the copyright sense, it would cause far-reaching problems well beyond calculators. For one thing, it would be illegal to distribute SHA-1 hashes of copyrighted material without permission."

It would be illegal to distribute _anything_. Hell, Maxtor could sue me for everything I create - after all, I'm just modifying the data they originally had on my hard drive.

Not really. The argument about the AACS key was not that the number itself was copyrighted, but rather that the number was the means to circumvent the protection measures controlling access to a copyrighted work. Thus, distribution of the number was a violation of the DMCA.

I'm not aware of anyone claiming that the number itself was copyrighted. Some people have suggested that line of argument in this case, but if TI really wanted to pursue this in court, they'd have to register the signing key with the copy

But how can I avoid using the illegal number if it is not published? And if the illegal number is published in legislation then that would certainly be very convenient. Saves having to host it elsewhere.

Although a Ti-83 can definitely be enhanced by a custom OS, the usefulness of a Ti-83 would greatly decrease for students if custom OS's existed.
On many standardized tests, including the SATs and ACTs, the tests specify which calculators are permitted for the test. They have a very specific list, based on which ones they think are not too powerful and would give an unfair advantage to a test taker. All ti-83's are allowed on either test for example.
But if the makers of the test knew that people could have ti-83's that had undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving as in the ti-89), the test makers would most likely disallow these calculators.
Why do you think TI still sells the Ti-83 plus, a calculator created in 1999? Certainly hardware abilities and processor speeds have greatly increased in the last 10 years. The reason is that test makers will not accept calculators with very powerful abilities. They want the student to solve the problem and not the calculator. When browsing calculators at education.ti.com, each calculator has a page called "exam acceptance" (ex. http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_ti83p.html?bid=2 [ti.com]). That is because TI sells a large number of its calculators to students.
The custom OS's could greatly hurt TI's reputation in the eyes of its biggest supporters: the test makers.

Oh come on, is that the best you can come up with? "undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving...)"

How about a reprogrammed calculator that simply stores answers? Looks like a calculator but is in fact a data retrieval device that holds all your crib notes. I'd say that is clearly a lot more useful to the exam taker in terms of cheating and would certainly be something that would be disallowed in an exam. Just like pulling out your iPhone would get you ejected from most serious

When you take most tests, the test takers take this in to account and force you to reset your calculators, deleting all of your programs that you could have stored your notes in. There is no way to check for a different OS

The college could always provide calculators for the examinations. Then students could buy and use whatever they like.

Maybe, but how many colleges and high schools have the money to buy hundreds of Ti-83's a $100 or so each? I live in a upper middle class neighborhood and they don't even provide tissues!

TI could provide calculators to schools for free to be used in examinations. It would be cheap and effective marketing because of the number of students who would go out and buy exactly the same device.

When you take most tests, the test takers take this in to account and force you to reset your calculators, deleting all of your programs that you could have stored your notes in. There is no way to check for a different OS

Except this is easily circumvented by faking a memory reset in the calculator's own programming. There are even assembly-programmed 'calculator in a calculator' tricks through ZShell and other means to even make the calculator appear to have wiped itself clean and empty, even a fake and working 'memory' screen and an apparently complete working emulation of the base calculator (Xzibit would be proud). One little button combo or phrase and the calculator exits the fakeout to access whatever you like, and can

The "legal list of allowable calculators" is precisely why the scientific calculator development is pretty much stagnant. I have an HP50G but it is basically a repackaged HP48 with a marginally better screen. But even the 48G was not allowed in the last math class I took that allowed calculators.

I started using an HP28S in college back in 1988. Back then, many teachers did not know what the calculators were capable of. Of course, I had one professor who did, and in fact LOVED them, and so made the tests

On many standardized tests, including the SATs and ACTs, the tests specify which calculators are permitted for the test.

If this were really truly a threat, then just provide the same calculator for everyone at the test. Calculators aren't that expensive. Ban bringing your own calculator into the test, and collect the calculator at the end of the test. Problem solved.

The custom OS's could greatly hurt TI's reputation in the eyes of its biggest supporters: the test makers.

Well cry me a river, why is that the problem of hardware hackers who have already PAID for their devices? If we had a law against every activity which might damage somebody else's business model then we would be living in a police state already. If the test makers don't want "powerful calculators" used on their exams then why not simply ban all calculators? If they are interested in testing mathematical knowledge rather than rote arithmetic or button pressing ability then why not simply design the test along those lines in the first place and enforce the suggested ban against electronic assistance? Technology is a moving target which will change over time; attempting to fix it in place by law, for whatever reason, is both destructive and counter-productive.

Only one problem with that. You ever seen how people abuse things that they are borrowing even for a short time? Plus the calculators would have to be lugged from test site to test site giving even more room for them to be broken.

Calculators are cheap. Just buy more.

And what happens to the person who can't get a calculator because one got broken on the trip to the test site?

Bring extras or refund the test taker's money. It's not hard.

Truly, the test makers should just go back to not allowing programmable graphing calculators and allow nothing better than a scientific calculator. That is all a student should need for taking a test.

And how do they know that a student hasn't modded their calculator to be either "programmable" or a communication device? This whole affair illustrates a flaw with the standardized tests. Namely, that they're more interested in reducing liability (and a rather weak liability at that) than in producing a reliable and trustworthy test.

You could just write down "sqrt(sin(53.128457638) + e^(3.563462378 * pi)) " on the answer sheet. The conversion to a single number is trivial with a calculator, so there is no need to include that in the exam.

I fully support what the EFF do but innovation is not simply limited to America - can I suggest in future they use the adjective "human", rather than "American", in similar statements? Otherwise, they're just affirming the stereotype that many of we non-US residents have, namely that Americans have no interest in the world outside their own shores.

The product was not sold as a computer or development platform. It was sold as an end user product with documented functionality as described in the user's manual. Sure enough, when the hacks disable their machines TI will get the support call. Most slashdotters will probably flame me for this.

I would be very surprised if a calculator hobbyist tried to get support for a modded device. And it is pretty easy for TI to say the warranty is void so STFU in that situation.

It's really hard for me to see how TI has a case under the DMCA at all. They're claiming the anti-circumvention clause, but it doesn't seem to apply here.

The anti-circumvention clause makes it a violation to circumvent copy protection -- but what the hobbyists are circumventing in not copy protection, it's a validation key. Without the key, you can still read and copy the existing OS without a hitch. The key is needed to put you own intellectual property on the device, no to copy theirs.

The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that (even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)

So where's the copyright violation? this looks like a criminal (bad faith) abuse of the DMCA to me.

>It's really hard for me to see how TI has a case under the DMCA at all. They're claiming>the anti-circumvention clause, but it doesn't seem to apply here.

They are going to claim anything and everything, because there is a lot of money at stake. If people crack one of TI's "exam approved" line of calculators such that anyone can download a new, unapproved OS (or other data) onto it, odds are good that schools will yank that entire line of calculators off of the "exam approved" list.

How so though? I thought the the QWERTY pads were actually more of the problem and hence not being able to use, say a ti-92 anywhere. there is really that much of a problem with changing the OS? I mean what could you possibly do on a ti-85 with new software than what you could do before? 3d equations? I mean the basic ones you can code in basic and even assembly on some. what they've done is really cool, but I think maybe this is more about TI being worried about someone opening up their software and eventu

TI calculators are $5 of hardware sold for $100 because of preferential (bought and paid for) treatment given by schools. They follow the same disgusting model that textbook publishers use; it hurts students, and it's kept calculator tech advancement practically stagnant.

All sorts of companies produce the exact same hardware and then have a registry bit/flag hidden somewhere to enable the more expensive features. nVidia and their Quadro cards comes to mind... Or Intel and their underclock/overclock crap... the chips are identical, one is stamped with a different number and frozen at a different multiplier.

TI probably has some features disabled or unavailable in their lower-end models, hack the software, and lo and behold, the actual hardware can probably do most of the same stuff the more expensive model can. I can see why they wouldn't want people *SHARING* this information with the general public.

Actually, come to think of it, if TI loses on this one, I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all, it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?

> TI probably has some features disabled or unavailable in their lower-end> models, hack the software, and lo and behold, the actual hardware can> probably do most of the same stuff the more expensive model can. I can see> why they wouldn't want people *SHARING* this information with the general> public.

So can I. So what? "Inconvenient for TI" is not a synonym for "illegal".

> I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all,> it's just some keys used for sign

I take a TI calculator, using keys obtained from internet forums I sign my hacked version (or homebrew, or whatever) and load it onto my device and expose functionality that I am not entitled to access from the hardware.
I take a Nintendo DS, using key

Because in the case of direct tv, you're paying for the service, not the hardware. If i go down to Best Buy and shell out $200 or whatever for a new TI-89 Titanium (my classic TI-89 is starting to look somewhat stayed...), then I never need anything from TI again. I take that thing, and I'm done. No real need to plug it into anything; TI doesn't beam the CAS down via CDMA wireless signal like some sort of Kindle thing.

Basically, with the calculator, the hardware itself is the FINAL PURCHASE, whereas with DirectTV, you're basically renting the hardware as a means to access a service, which is what you're actually paying for in the end. Cheating on what you're paying for as far as channels go is clearly wrong. Modifying a piece of hardware that once bought never needs to have any interaction with the mother company again is completely different.

If you install Linux on your PC when it came with Windows, thus giving yourself a full development environment, when the PC itself didn't come with that software capability in the first place, then that's the same according to your rebuttal.

Installing a new OS on your TI or on your computer is more like buying the DirectTV dish then re-purposing it as part of some amateur radio operation, not unencrypting channels in DTV's data stream.

All sorts of companies produce the exact same hardware and then have a registry bit/flag hidden somewhere to enable the more expensive features. nVidia and their Quadro cards comes to mind... Or Intel and their underclock/overclock crap... the chips are identical, one is stamped with a different number and frozen at a different multiplier.

That's why those types of things are done with fuses, so that's it's virtually impossible to re-enable features that have been fused out. It's certainly impossible to do purely in software.

TI seems to have a perfectly valid case here. This seems like a clear breach of the DMCA. The law itself is completely unacceptable, but don't blame the company for a bad law, blame the legislators.

Even if you were correct (and, well, you're not) one can still question the ethics of a company for permitting its attorneys to intimidate others using said bad law. You seem to think that just because a law is on the books that that any use (or misuse) of that law is acceptable. It isn't, and TI's upper management should know that. And if it so happens that they're arrogant and stupid, their legal staff should have so informed them.

Lawsuits are a convenient way of getting the law changed or at least ruining it for those that abuse it. If one can prove the point that the law is unacceptable by demonstrating it using this case, then the law is unenforceable from that point forward.

What would you have people do? Write desperate missives to their congressmen imploring on them how ridiculous this law is in theory using hypotheticals? How far do you think that has ever gotten anyone?

No. In Feist vs. Rural Telephone [wikipedia.org], the Supreme Court ruled that in order to qualify for copyright, a work must exhibit at least some degree of creative expression, and reaffirmed the notion that facts cannot be copyrighted. Unless some creativity went into creating the encryption key, I cannot see how it can be copyrighted. (IANAL, of course.)

Well, stick around some more, because it's not what the DMCA is designed to prevent.

As others have pointed out, you can only invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA if the technological protection measures are controlling access to a copyrighted work. Simply bypassing a measure alone is not a violation of the DMCA.

In this case, they obtained keys that allow them to install custom software on the device. Where that software comes from may be a copyright issue, but that is not relevant to the overall matter of whether obtaining and using the keys is a violation of the DMCA. These keys control whether the hardware accepts given software; rather than controlling access to copyrighted software, the keys, in a manner of speaking, control the software's access to the hardware, so it's not a matter for the DMCA.